No rules

You know what? This linking of my daily blog on our parish website is turning out to be a really good thing for my soul. Maybe even salvific. With an audience beyond myself, I'm tempering my language, and also having second thoughts on what I write about: no whining, 

for example; otherwise today I might write about the Parking Stasi. Agents of the GGHV, the Garage Gestapo of Harbour Village who, weighty with position and authority, and perhaps running out of useful engagement for their Time during Shelter in Place, have officiously taken to "ticketing" cars in our underground garage here at Harbour Village!!

Each condo unit has been issued one yellow parking permit so you may park a car in the south half of the underground garage while the contractors are using the north half of the garage for materials storage. So everyone parks one car and there's still plenty of extra, leftover parking space: residents had quietly taken to bringing our second car into the garage to park out of the salt air and weather, and convenient to the elevators. And even with everyone who wanted to bringing in a second car, there were still many empty parking places in the garage, never a space problem. But minor officials will don their sash of self-importance and tell us to move our second car back out to the marina (which now, with shelter in place easing up, is filling up with the vehicles of boaters, fishermen, and picnickers). 

So, we moved our second car. One can always mark an officious person: anyone with a bit of authority whose life is given over to enforcing a rule beyond the rule's purpose. Years ago in Apalachicola, a young teenager, he was 13 or 14 at the time, who used to earn money by working to help me by doing various labor at the church, was stopped and ticketed by a new-to-the-community Florida Highway Patrol trooper. The boy's crime: on a dirt back road where there was never any traffic, at an intersection where two dirt roads crossed, the boy rode his bicycle through the crossroads without stopping for the stop sign. A boy on a bicycle. Pedaling the ruts in dirt roads in the back part of a small town. The trooper had been sitting there in his FHP patrol car just waiting for someone, anyone, to come along and break a rule. He ticketed the boy. The boy had his choice of paying a fine or going to court. He had no money to pay the fine. Enraged, I wrote the local newspaper a letter, itself not very temperate, which the editor published, slamming the stupidity of the FHP trooper. And I wrote the county judge a letter, more temperate, telling what I thought of the trooper and that my church would pay the boy's fine and court costs, whatever. I don't remember exactly how the court disposed of the case except that the judge did write back to me, declining to take payment from the church. 

There are rules and there are rules. Rules are meant to serve purposes. But in life, kindness counts. Thoughtfulness counts. Common sense counts. Consideration counts. Not being stupid counts. Agape counts. Generosity counts. Where rules are unnecessary, only the mindless insist on enforcing them. The mindless officious. But we're parking one car on the marina again anyway, even though the parking garage is filled with vacant parking spaces. And no doubt some self-important Badge is still ticketing bicycling boys on dirt back roads of small towns. And there are officials, okay I'll say it, prelates, in The Episcopal Church who evidently haven't noticed that when Jesus was feeding folks he fed everyone present, no rules; and who seem to think the church belongs to us. I'm not slamming the church, but I am contemning our canon that reads "No unbaptized person shall be eligible to receive Holy Communion in this Church". Many priests have long ignored and defied it, myself for nearly forty years as a parish priest. Nowadays I am proud to be in a diocese where the bishop announces that this is not our table, that it belongs to Jesus, who welcomes everyone to come be fed, so come, come. I'm hopeful that in Time the entire church will come around; the church that no longer shuns divorced people; that now has women bishops, women priests, women deacons, women lectors, women ushers, women delegates, girl acolytes, women on vestry, women chalice bearers; that allows marriage of same sex couples, that has men on the altar guild; hopeful that General Convention, yea even its House of Bishops, will come round, to delete and silence the shameful Canon 1.17.7. The time is past for rationalizing history, precedent, tradition; for casuistry, sophistry passed as theology; for holding to practice because it's the way we've always done it. Nothing matters but welcoming, loving hospitality and WWJD.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping my mouth shut about the Parking Police, bless their little hearts. 

And yes, that's a Ferrari police car. Black with red leather seats.

But oh, I wanted to mention one of our readings for next Sunday:

The First Lesson
Acts 2:42-47

Those who had been baptized devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. 

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The first verse is familiar to anyone who pays attention when we renew our baptismal covenant, the first promise:

Will you continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers? I will, with God's help.

The concluding verse, about "those who were being saved" pauses me for a moment. I think I know what "saved" has meant in my own time, to those Christians who use the term. I do not deride them. I think it generally means to them, that they are, to use Jerry Falwell's expression "as sure for heaven as if they were already there". I'm thinking this morning of another teenage boy, Nicholas (not my grandson), who was a parishioner in my parish some twenty-five or thirty years ago. Because of misgivings about public education in our county, his parents enrolled him in a Christian high school in the next county over (it was not an Episcopal school). In early, perhaps admission questioning, he was asked "Are you saved?" to which he said "Yes". Then, "When were you saved?" to which he responded "On Good Friday afternoon two thousand years ago". I was so proud of him. Clearly, he had heard the gospel and understood it.

But today, "saved", after a lifetime of living in the Bible Belt of the South and all my growing up years hearing the question "Are you saved?" I still struggle with it. My father's response, which I've told here before, was always "We don't have a religion to die by, we have a religion to live by", and I like that. But "saved"? I don't know. I don't want to be presumptuous, I think it's God's problem. I think so, but it's not bothering me, and I hope it's not a troubling issue with you. Judging by the Acts reading, maybe to Luke (wrote Acts) "saved" comes with being baptized? Or in washing away of the sin of complicity in the crucifixion? At that early date (Pentecost) it could hardly have meant believing in Jesus, could it? But to Luke writing about it decades later it could have meant that, eh? Was being saved to Luke the same as Paul's being gathered under the umbrella of the God of Jesus, the belief of Jesus, and therefore safe for the imminent Second Coming? I can't say.

The other thing in my mind about the Bible passage above. It reminds me that Easter is our season of Baptism. In some parishes, and yes I did it in my parishes sometimes, instead of the Nicene Creed through the Easter Season we renewed our Baptismal Covenant. I think that's good, although we do get tired of saying it liturgically. Repetition is emphasis.

Another Easter Season liturgical practice in some dioceses and parishes, including sometimes in mine, is to take advantage of the rubric "On occasion the Confession of Sin may be omitted". On the ground that Good Friday and Easter make our own personal Confession and Absolution redundant and, again, presumptuous. How so? Because the Confession & Absolution process somehow "gives us control", we think. We have a sense that praying the Confession entitles us to have the priest stand and pronounce the Absolution. That's not the case. Absolution is not an entitlement in any event. Furthermore and moreover, casting one's sins at the foot of the empty Cross is a risk of faith, most appropriate during Easter. If faith is confidence in what we hope for, assurance of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1), we need to let go of "control" and put our faith to the test by taking the theological risk of our confidence and assurance in the power of Good Friday and Easter. 

Everyone doesn't agree with me, indeed, no one is required to!

RSF&PTL
T+ 

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